Below you’ll find my research projects organized by publication status. For questions on any specific work (even works in progress), feel free to email me.
This paper identifies a novel threat to deliberative autonomy – a kind of control one has over one’s deliberative process – arising from the way agents express themselves through action. Drawing on T.M. Scanlon’s account of an action’s meaning, we argue that many actions bear expressive significance in virtue of the motivating reasons behind them. Because deliberative autonomy partly consists in one’s ability to shape a meaningful life through control over such expressions, we have a moral interest in maintaining opportunities for expressive action. We show that these opportunities can be undermined by well-meaning interventions that change the justificatory context in which others act, thereby altering the possible meanings their actions can bear. This has a surprising upshot. We sometimes act wrongly in giving someone new reasons to do what they were going to do anyway. We conclude with some brief thoughts about what this possibility means for individual morality as well as for political philosophy.
This paper investigates whether a relational egalitarian defense of democracy at the state level can ground a parallel case argument for workplace democracy. I argue that it can in two ways. First, I evaluate the arguments of a prominent relational egalitarian (Niko Kolodny) who believes it cannot and show that his arguments are mistaken in ways that lead him to underestimate the strength of the parallel case. Second, I develop a positive model of the connection between relational equality and democracy – called the “proportionality model” – which clearly and strongly supports the case for democracy at the state and workplace levels.
“Felt Subjection and Relational Equality” Moral Philosophy and Politics (2026)
This paper explores how felt subjection – the vivid awareness of subordination to another in a power hierarchy – undermines relational equality by eroding egalitarian regard, the disposition to conceive of oneself and others as equals. While relational egalitarians often focus on objective or structural social conditions, I argue that the subjective experience of power matters to relational egalitarian justice in a way which has been undertheorized. To this end, I define egalitarian regard and clarify its role in relational equality, identify properties of power’s expression which tend to evoke felt subjection, and summarize empirical evidence linking it to inegalitarian regard. Finally, I present a moral-psychological mechanism to explain this connection, showing it as a reasonable outcome of human psychology. I conclude by applying the insights of this paper to the case of the workplace, showing how the framework developed provides relational egalitarians with new tools for analyzing institutions and the relations that constitute them.
“Responsibility for Work and Its Effects" (with Dana Nelkin) in The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Work (2025)
In this chapter, we consider the question of how to attribute—and distribute—responsibility for work and its effects, focusing especially on cases when work has bad effects and there is not obviously a single person to blame. We assess answers provided by collective or group agency views and individualist views, in part by showing how a subtle understanding of the relationship among responsibility, blameworthiness, and liability can help resolve apparently recalcitrant collective cases. Drawing insights from each view, we introduce and assess an individualist account according to which each agent is responsible and blameworthy in virtue of what they do given their opportunities, where the focus is on the ex-ante assessment of the possible consequences of agents’ contributions in light of situational factors including the actions and omissions of others. We then highlight the distinctiveness of work by exploring the difference between moral and other kinds of responsibility for work and the hierarchical structure characteristic of work in collective contexts.
“An Unwelcome Implication for Omnivores?” Utilitas (2025)
Most people believe that animal agriculture for food production is permissible. At the same time, bestiality enjoys neither widespread social endorsement nor practice. It would be surprising, then, if it turned out that a commitment to the permissibility of one implied the permissibility of the other. This is the case that I make in this paper. Given the truth of some very plausible moral premises, I show that in a wide range of possible instantiations, if a social practice of raising animals for food is permissible, then so too is a social practice of raising animals for sex. While I don’t explicitly argue for this, my hope is that this compels readers to reject the permissibility of animal agriculture rather than endorse the permissibility of bestiality.
This paper argues that there is an important connection between relational equality, basic moral equality, and democracy. Specifically, it argues that our basic moral equality is grounded in our autonomous agency, relational equality is grounded in basic moral equality, and that these two facts together entail that relational equality requires democracy.
This paper argues against the widespread view that relations of domination are, in and of themselves, seriously objectionable. The central case is made via a novel thought experiment which fully isolates the domination variable and asks us to trade something of value to avoid domination per se. It argues that analysis of such a case shows that, despite intuitive appearance, domination is not itself morally important.
In this paper, I argue that an explicitly egalitarian conception of the democratic ideal can justify a system of weighted voting -- systems wherein some people's votes count for more than others. In pursuit of this conclusion, I highlight the pertinent ideal, identify ambiguities that have misleadingly caused theorists to assume it requires equally weighted votes, and explain why, at least in cases where people stand to be differentially affected by a decision, weighted voting can be both appropriate and required.
The beneficiary pays principle (BPP) standardly states that when one benefits as a result of wrongdoing, one can come to owe compensation to the victim of the wrongdoing in question. In this paper, I highlight various explanatory problems with this way of understanding the BPP. Most importantly, this account of the BPP fails to explain what I call the "primacy" and "weight" intuitions. The primacy intuition states that when the wrongdoer themselves is able to be made to pay compensatory damages, they are solely on the hook for doing so. The weight intuition states that the moral importance of competing reasons needed to outweigh one's obligation to compensate the victim of a wrongdoing is much lower when considering the beneficiary than when considering the wrongdoer.
After explaining why the standard view of the BPP struggles to make sense of these two intuitions, I take up the task of presenting a version of the BPP which allows us to accommodate them while maintain much of what was intuitively plausible about BPP to begin with. The important move, I argue, is to give up the claim that the BPP is a compensatory principle. Rather, I suggest our intuitions are better explained by holding that the connection to a wrong that both the beneficiary and victim share generates agent-relative reasons of partiality on the part of the beneficiary to promote the welfare of the victim.
Some relational egalitarians believe that the value of equality explains the authority of democratically made decisions. Put simply, when one chooses to disobey a law made through a procedure which treats all as equals, one treats one's fellow citizens as inferiors. This paper argues that this is implausible in cases of disobedience to substantively unjust law. I present my case in the form of a dilemma. When one's co-citizens voted, they either did so with the aim of furthering justice or with the aim of simply imposing their will, come what may for justice. If the former, then when one disobeys an unjust law, one does not treat their fellow citizens as inferiors, because one acts in a way which respects their deeper, truer commitments. If the latter, then the citizens' vote was simply a display of naked power and cannot plausibly generate relational reasons for obedience. So, in either case, democratically made decisions do not have a special authority grounded in relational egalitarian value. At least not in cases of substantively unjust law.
Standard account of domination view domination's effect on the subordinated as largely orthogical to its instantiation. This makes it difficult for such accounts to explain why domination matters. This paper seeks to improve domination theory by centering victim effects. The central claim is that domination occurs when another’s superior power illicitly interferes in one’s deliberative process: it is an invasion into the space of reasons.
In this paper I argue that many of the purported rights capitalists have over productive property belie the legitimate purpose of property rights generally. Property, I argue, is best understood as a social convention designed to protect and further our interests in autonomy. Property rights, then, are derived from, and gain their value in virtue of, our autonomy rights. But the purported rights of capitalists over productive property frequently entail a right to the control of people, and thus run roughshod over the value of autonomy. Capitalist property rights represent a specific use of a social convention which undermines the very purpose that convention was meant to serve. I call this a “Millian Subversion,” in reference to Mill’s famous discussion regarding the impermissibility of selling oneself into slavery.